Murrayfield Stadium welcomed crowds of Swifties on the first night of her tour in the UK
The Taylor Swift juggernaut rolled into Scotland on Friday night and Edinburgh was hit with a tsunami of pink cowboy hats, sequinned outerwear, and unusually good behaviour. Rather than bunking the train fare from London, young fans presented the conductor with friendship rings. There was nobody relieving themselves in the streets around the stadium.
As the Eras tour cemented its status as the highest-grossing of all time with this vast bonanza, and everyone cashed in — from Edinburgh Gin (“one for every Era” went the advert) to the kebab shops with cut-out Swifts in the windows — the reason for her once in a generation success became clear. She is the world’s most clean-cut pop sensation.
With her emphasis on hard work, emotional expunging, ability to capture the concerns of young women worldwide and a general suggestion that if you can dream it, you can be it, she is a triumph of wholesomeness. No wonder, during a particularly volatile period in world history, she has become such a phenomenon.
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“Oh hey!” said Swift, managing to sound surprised at bumping into 73,000 people, after popping out of a floaty cloud parachute on a raised podium before she belted out Cruel Summer. And Swift really was a remarkable performer, somehow bringing a sense of playfulness to the spectacle, from doing a suit-clad routine to You Need To Calm Down to announcing casually that the “lass” on stage was performing the most attended concert in Scottish history.
She didn’t do much dancing: it was all in the hand gestures and the facial expressions. She was actually singing — not always the case with shows of this size — and pacing her voice accordingly: shifting around the beat, following a big number with a slow one.
She was glamorous but not impossibly so, meaning fans could emulate her sparkling bodysuit and boots without too much difficulty. And when she led the stadium in a singalong of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, followed by I Knew You Were Trouble, we were reminded that at the heart of it all are superb pop songs; catchy, uplifting and imbued, whatever their subject matter, with an innocent spirit.
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The Eras concert is broken up by albums, which meant certain highs and lows: pop zingers during the Red and 1989 album sections, heart on sleeve ballads from a Disney Princess for Speak Now, taking the guise of a wood nymph in an enchanted glade for Folklore (inspired by Scotland, apparently), a not entirely convincing slant toward edginess during Reputation, complete with dancers trapped inside Perspex booths. Swift was doing what amounted to a greatest hits show, but in a thematic fashion.
Elsewhere came familiar stadium staples: showers of fireworks, smiling dancers, the obligatory black-clad dude doing a squealing solo for the indie rock-like Lover (one for the dads in the audience). Swift’s trick is to front all this with an enthusiasm that suggests she is doing it for the first time. “My one regret is that I didn’t get to play Scotland more,” she said, and whether she said it to every country or not, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t a sense at the concert that you didn’t have to be a part of Swift’s gang; everyone was welcome.
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“I was writing this in the middle of the pandemic, when I didn’t know if we would ever do this concert thing again,” she said before Champagne Problems, a lachrymose piano ballad that inspired a mass, yet hushed, singalong. It was followed by an extended bout of applause and Swift announcing, “I love you so much, thank you,” cementing the strange intimacy between performer and audience on which concerts like this depend. At one point, she looked like she was about to burst into tears. Staged or not, it had the required emotional effect.
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The most artistic staging was for her new album The Tortured Poets Department, which took the form of a mini musical; an epic of feminine drama, complete with the overwrought Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? and a bit of former boyfriend bashing with The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, all performed with marching dancers in white who ended up collapsed on a heap on the stage. At one point they went into a Busby Berkeley style routine, bringing Hollywood pizazz to an unseasonably chilly Edinburgh night.
That she managed it, and turned it into a very human moment of intimacy, helped explain the Swift phenomenon. For all the extravaganza of this vast stadium show, it was the glimpses of the person inside that really made it work. That must be why she is, at this moment, the biggest pop star on the planet: because she knows how to connect.
★★★★☆